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grammar. He stared at ceilings and buildings and calculated the dimensions, the number of joists and beams in the school. He figured probabilities for an illiterate bookmaker at the dog track when he was ten, the numbers tumbling inside his brain while he groomed and walked the whippets after school, and was given a nickel for his efforts.
    He was adorable and bossy in the way that only the youngest can be, the baby that Mama protects and defends before the rest of the brood, and he was a shrimp and a know-it-all who was usually right. He hated his family’s poverty, which forced him to wear all the hand-me-downs, even his sisters’ shoes, to school, and determined to make piles of money when he grew up. When he got teased he lashed out with his fists, and he was a scrapper. He once broke a boy’s nose for saying the word
ravioli.
    Ranking next to poverty was shame for his family heritage. He watched the newsreels and movies in which Italians were happy idiots who played the concertina and drank wine like his pop, and he dreamed of being a famous inventor with a nose job and a penthouse in San Francisco. Joe thought of changing his last name, too,especially for business purposes. Joe Verb: Action Enterprises. But the business Joe eventually steered was a family affair, a group of hungry Italians building, first on the swamp his father had bought for next to nothing, and later anywhere Uncle Sam asked them to, during the war boom of the ’40s.
    B y the late ’50s, Joe and his brothers and sisters, whose husbands worked for the family business, were doing well, but they thought their father had lost his mind. He’d always been a drinker and wanderer, and had often spent months away from home at jobs with other Italians or just hanging out in the island culture of North Beach, but now his brain had stepped off a cliff, and at the bottom of that cliff was a teenaged hooker and her illegitimate baby.
    No ugly stereotyping could have disgusted Joe more than these latest shenanigans, no joke about Italian soldiers or Italian funerals with only two pallbearers could have angered him further. He looked at himself in the barber’s mirror and asked for a flattop; he avoided Italian food, except on Sundays at his mother’s; he hid the Sinatra records under a stack of magazines until his daughter Penny found them and filled the house with Frankie Boy swinging with Nelson Riddle’s band.
    It was Penny who talked him into going to see the old man. They were at a little Italian hole in the wall celebrating her twelfth birthday, just daddy and daughter, and she brought the subject up as if it had just occurred to her. Isn’t Grandpa’s place a few blocks from here? Shouldn’t we drop in on them?
    Why? Joe glared at the menu.
    You’ve got to see that baby, Dad. He is so beautiful! Your, um . . . brother, Jesús.
    Maria, the young Mexican mother who pronounced Jesús like
Hej-Zeus,
fascinated Penny as much as the baby did. Giuseppe, the butt of a thousand jokes in Rosari’s repertoire, was a harmless geezer to his granddaughter, a funny old guy who would probably slip her a five-dollar bill as a birthday present.
    They’d taken the L train from Berkeley over the Bay Bridge and a cable car to Chinatown, from which they’d walked to North Beach. A waiter spoke to Joe in Italian, and Joe reminded the guy that they were in America, if he didn’t notice. Joe checked his watch, tapped his fingers on the table, made notations on a napkin. He had a hell of a lot on his mind because his brothers were watching the shop and an important deal was imminent, but he wanted to give Penny her day. He left the table to call Ludovico, read him some numbers from the napkin, and told Lu to take them down, but his brother, whose moods were sudden and violent, told him to butt the hell out and enjoy his daughter and his ravioli, for Christ’s sake.
    Try prime rib, Joe said. You sure you guys are all right? These bastards from New Jersey will have